MATERIAL, MATERIAL MATERIAL AND COMPATABILITY

[Justin T. Wittwer]

For all of you who ship and receive material, you should read this. Especially if you are in charge of re-renting material for an existing project where you have to match equipment types. If you do not work for a company that exclusively uses one material type from a  single manufacturer IE  Harsco or Safway. You need to know what you have and where to get more of it. You especially need to know if you are using Imperial material, IE. SAE sizes, 2' 3' 4' etc. or Non-Imperial, 3'-7", 4'3" 5'-2" for the simple fact that the plank for these two types are not compatible. Specifically the plank. If you are using the 12" wide grating board type, manufactured by Layher and a few other sources, you cannot use a Safway style hook plank with these. They don't line up and the hooks won't hook on the same ledger. They are also different widths. The Grating type boards are 12" wide and the Safway style plank are 9" wide.  From my experience all grating boards are Non-Imperial, (I refuse to call the metric because the sizes don't equate into actual metric sizes) and the Safway style (or S-Hook plank) seem to be exclusively Imperial. While you can get different ledger sizes that will work with both Imperial and Non-Imperial the plank won't match up. Now you could always use the mighty wood plank for this, and we have, but if you are going to ship material across the country the very least you can do is make sure it is the right material. Now along with these two types we have a third type, the dog eared plank. These will sit at the same height as a grating board,( well maybe not exactly, but close enough right) the hooks don't line up. It's kind of like this, If you own a Ford would you really want to put Chevy parts on it? I think everybody needs to remember back to high school physics class that two masses cannot occupy the same space. (If you need a physics lesson on this may I recommend the Big Bang theory on TBS, maybe if Sheldon explains it you will understand or iTunes University maybe the have Physics for Dummies) Simple fact is this. Do a little home work and know what you are shipping and make sure if you need more you know where to get it. If you're going to shop "off the rack" you better make sure you know more than 1 good tailor.

Please feel free to forward this to anyone who ships material for any of your companies, or anyone else who may benefit from this and get us the right gear.  All you material people, operations managers, warehouse people, material managers, etc... It's not just about numbers, It has to be the right number of the right product or we are just paying freight for nothing. Just because Company XYZ has 700 - 7' plank doesn't necessarily mean that they have the 700-7' plank you need. Simple fact and conclusion of this entire rant. "Know what you have, know what you're shipping and know what  you're renting and for the love of God know how it all goes together!." If you don't know how the material goes together check out YouTube for a video or something. It's not just about parts and pieces from our perspective, It's about finished products we can be proud of!